Big Guns, revisited

Reposting this, because Libya's celebrating 40 years since the revolution this week.

When I was 8 we moved to Libya. We lived in temporary housing for the first months, downtown in Tripoli. My brother was 6 and my sister three months old. My brother and i were like fric and frac, always the same height, identical coloring, people asked if we were twins regularly. Our birthdays were two years and two weeks apart. The first night in our new home we heard this godawful wailing during what seemed like the middle of the night. Very loud, we were sure the place was haunted and ran into our parents bedroom. They had no idea what the noise was. Turns out our apartment (4rth floor) was right next to a mosque. With loudspeakers, of course, calling to prayer, right at our level.

One day my mom asked us to go to the store for her. It was a few blocks from our apt. So we went, and my brother knocked a bottle of pop onto the floor, where it broke and splashed onto my legs and feet and into my shoes. Ick. I took them off, it was summer, preferring barefoot to sticking shoes. So we're walking along, I'm fairly small, btw, for my age, about the size of my 6yo brother. All of a sudden I feel someone's hand in my underwear, from behind.

It happened so fast it was exactly like that, my first awareness of it was feeling it, this guy had come up from behind me and lifted my dress and put his hand in my pants in one fast move. In the next move I turned to his smirking face and swung those shoes into his head, yelling. He was pretty big, about 12 or 13, and looked shocked. Then took off running across the street into a vacant lot. Another Libyan kid was there and saw the whole thing, he ran after him as I was screaming, in English, for him to get him. They disappeared into an alley and we went home. For the longest time I was afraid I might be pregnant. Seriously. Instead, I got a vaginal staff infection and antibiotics.

months later. One morning i stayed home from school, my brother left for the bus stop as usual. After about five minutes he's back, telling my mother he couldn't go to school because soldiers were shooting at the kids at the bus stop. My mom was pretty incredulous, so he told her to look out the window. I looked with her. He was right. Well, except the shooting was with blanks, after lots of warnings to get inside. That was our introduction to Qaddafi. and his army of 14 year old boys. Some of it's a little fuzzy, but that part is pretty vivid, how young they were. Like they'd been let out of school to play war, they were pumped up, riding around in the back of trucks waving their rifles and machine guns.

Martial law was in place for a while, maybe a week or so, like 12 hour curfew. My smart dad had thought ahead to get a hard core short wave radio to bring with us. We got all our news from BBC in South Africa. That way we knew about the revolution, all of it. It wasn't so bad, better because we were in an apartment building, so we could go back and forth to neighbors and we all shared food and essential stuff. In the end there was only one death, from someone shooting them self accidentally, as i remember.

My next memory is one afternoon going downstairs to the lobby of our building to see a soldier sitting there shooting the shit with the doorman. He had a gun with him. It was as big as I was. Well, that's the way I remember it, anyway. I backed up toward the stairs. At that time I wore glasses. He wanted to look at them, gesturing to me, speaking in Arabic, to take them off and give them to him. That would have meant getting closer to him. The doorman, in English, encouraged me, telling me he wouldn't hurt me. Not convincing. It was very scary, felt like a catch 22. Was he more likely to shoot if I ran away, or if I was closer to him. Was he mad at me already because I didn't give him my glasses right away? I ran, his laughter chasing me up the stairs.